Naming no names, but it can hardly have escaped the notice of most Whovians that there's a general kerfuffle going on in the Twittersphere regarding certain lost episodes. The discussion is primarily focused between two fairly well known fans of the show with various other people chiming in at regular intervals in support of one or the other. The whole thing regularly descends into unseemly territory, and quite honestly doesn't do any section of Fandom any credit. Yet it's impossible to not follow it, which means that on some level you're contributing to the whole thing continuing.
7. Deciding What 'Counts'
Mentioned above, the company Big Finish have been producing new audio adventures featuring the 4th-8th Doctors since 2000. Before the revival in 2005 everyone was more or less happy to consider these as 'Canon' (i.e., just as 'real' as The Doctor's televised adventures.) Once they started making the show again things got a little more complicated. If the Big Finish audios were 'canon', did that mean that the books published by Virgin and the BBC between 1993 and 2005 were also 'real'? If so, what about the fact that Human Nature happens to The Doctor twice, once to the 7th Doctor and once to the 10th? What about the comic strip? Frobisher the shape-shifting penguin (yes you read that correctly) appears both there and in the Big Finish audios, so does that make him 'count'? It all gets incredibly complicated, incredibly quickly. Ultimately the best advice is simply to enjoy the stories that you enjoy and ignore the ones you don't.
Mikey is, in no particular order, a freelance writer, improvisational comedian, volunteer firefighter, playwright, Bon Vivant, and Jane Espenson enthusiast.
Born in the small mining town of Eden Prairie, MN, he has some 40 years later successfully moved about 20 miles north of there to the City of Brooklyn Center, MN where he lives with an unreasonable number of dogs.
If you'd like to hear him discuss something other than Doctor Who while pretending to be a dog, check out www.the42ndvizsla.blogspot.com or follow him on twitter at @the42ndVizlsa
